First Personage

Louise Nevelson

Contemporary Art

Louise Nevelson described this sculpture as “one of the first major pieces” she created. The “personage’s” undulating frontal slab suggests a composed, outer persona, and the spiky column behind, an inner, agitated, true self. Nevelson later recalled that the work’s persona emerged in the process of creation: “While I was filing and working away at it, there was a knot where the mouth was supposed to be, just a plain knot, and I, being so concentrated, all of a sudden I saw this knot, mouth moving. And the whole thing was black by then and it frightened me.”

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